More Than You Can Say (20 page)

‘It was so kind of you to come all this way just to see me,’ said Sergeant Hawkes.

‘I should have come before,’ I said. ‘Keep in touch. Let me know if they move you. I’ll visit again, wherever you are.’

Sergeant Hawkes took my hand as if to shake it, then patted it with the other hand. I knew I wouldn’t come again. I couldn’t bear seeing what had happened to him.

On the train back I thought about Sergeant Hawkes and what he had given up for his country. He had given up what most of us called a life: to live out his days partially sighted and heavily disabled doing some administrative job in the back office of a garrison camp was the best he could look forward to. I had two or three newspapers in front of me to kill the time: they were full of stories about a new football coach at Chelsea; a row between the government and a banker; a celebrity who was dying of cancer. There was also a small article, less than an inch of single column, about a car bomb killing sixty people in a market in Baghdad.

There was nothing else in the papers that day about the wars that had taken away so much of Sergeant Hawkes’s life. Nobody knew where these places were, or what they looked like, apart from a few glimpses of rock and sand on
television. Nobody knew what the lives of the people had been like before we invaded, or what their lives were like now. Nobody knew why we were there: either they didn’t believe the official explanations or, more often, they simply didn’t understand them. Recently the public had begun to take more notice of soldiers coming home on leave: there were a few well-reported funeral parades; a few welcome-home parties in the local pubs. But what did it really mean? Most people felt it had nothing to do with them, after all. It was a war on terror which had produced yet more terror, and everyone had already forgotten how it started, what lies had been told, or what truths had emerged.

I turned the pages and found no more allusions to the terrible conflicts that were raging so many thousands of miles away, so I read the cricket results instead.

The next morning I went out and bought a mobile phone. I rang the number Nick Davies had given me. There was no answer, so I left a message on his voicemail. Back at the flat I tried to keep calm while I waited to hear whether he and his team had managed to get a warrant to enter the house in Oxfordshire. I kept wondering what might be happening to Adeena. I couldn’t bear the thought of them questioning her, or perhaps worse, asking her questions about me that she couldn’t answer. I felt like screaming with frustration at my own inactivity. But still I waited: some instinct told me to stay where I was, and wait a little longer.

It didn’t take long before my patience was exhausted, and by the middle of the morning I’d had enough. God knows what might be happening to her. I put on my jacket and went to the front door and pulled it open. Nick Davies, who had been standing outside, practically fell on his face.

‘Christ, you gave me a surprise,’ he said, when he had recovered his balance. ‘Do you always answer the door like that?’

‘I didn’t hear you ring,’ I said.

He didn’t look any less tired or better dressed than the last time I saw him. Instead of his raincoat he was wearing a navy blue blazer and a rather grubby white shirt, open at the neck.

‘Can I come in?’ he asked. ‘We need to talk.’

I made way for him and then closed the door. ‘Coffee?’

‘Please.’

I made two mugs and we went and sat at the kitchen table. For a while he did not speak, but sipped at the coffee as if it was the only thing that might bring him back to life. Then he said, ‘We didn’t get a warrant, you know.’

‘Why not?’ I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard and I had difficulty in keeping my voice down. A day had passed and nothing had been done to find Adeena and bring her back.

‘Nowadays every request for a warrant of that sort has to go through our tame solicitor’s office. They check through the Human Rights Act, and the Criminal Justice Immigration Act, and the Terrorism Act, and the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act and who knows what else. On this occasion they decided that we had insufficient proof that your Mr Khan was our Mr Aseeb. Go away and get more evidence, they told us. They didn’t tell us where to get it from.’

‘I see,’ I said. But I didn’t see. ‘So you’ve done absolutely nothing.’

‘Oh yes, we had someone drive by the house. It’s occupied. That’s probably where your friend Mr Khan is right now. And the girl – I’m sorry, your wife …’

I said nothing. There was a long silence while Nick waited for me to speak.

‘I read your file, you know. Your service records.’

‘Really?’

‘You were with Task Force Black.’

‘We were in support.’

‘You used to kill terrorists. So why are they now part of your social life?’

I didn’t feel his remark deserved an answer.

‘Tell me about the Aseeb set-up. Who else was there?’

I told him about Kevin and Amir.

‘Your friend Kevin doesn’t sound like a problem,’ Nick said after a moment’s thought.

‘Not until he gets behind the wheel of a car.’

‘But this other guy Amir, we don’t know about him. That’s a worry.’

He sat and worried for a moment. Then he asked: ‘What else can you tell me about the girl? She sure as hell doesn’t look like an Afghan.’

I hesitated and then said, ‘Well, she might be part French.’

‘Part French? What’s the story there?’

So I told him about Nadine Lemprière, her father the journalist and her Palestinian mother.

‘She has two names now, has she? Do all your friends have two names?’

‘I got the impression that her parents are dead. She adopted an Afghan name when she worked there.’

‘That’s what we call a legend,’ said Nick. ‘Normal people don’t need two names.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. We need to know more. I can’t send anyone into that house until our departmental solicitor takes his thumb out of his arse and gets us a warrant. Why don’t you go?’

We stared at each other. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard him say.

‘But yesterday … you told me not to.’

‘I’ve seen your file since then. You
might
cope better than the average man in the street. And we have got to do something. If you can find out what’s going on, then that might be better than nothing.’

‘I want to find Adeena,’ I said to him. ‘We’ve wasted nearly a day while you lot were trying to get your act together. I’ll find her if she’s there, and I’ll bring her back.’

‘And if she comes back with you, then we’ll know she didn’t want to be with Aseeb in the first place.’ Nick paused and then added: ‘We need to know she’s not part of Aseeb’s project.’

‘What project?’ I asked.

‘Whatever he brought the girl into the country for. Whatever he paid you ten grand for. There’s something going on here, Richard. This is a man with a plan and we need to stop him. The trouble is, the girl might be part of it. You know that, don’t you? Our allies in Afghanistan might want to ask her a few questions too.’

Nick watched my face as he said this. He was talking about rendition. It didn’t happen, and no government would ever admit that it happened. But I knew he meant sending Adeena to Bagram airfield in the south-east of Afghanistan: the other Guantanamo, the one that didn’t appear on the television news.

‘She’s not part of anything,’ I told him. ‘She’s just got caught up in something. The same way I did.’

‘Of course,’ added Nick, ‘Aseeb may not want to let Adeena go. He may have decided to move her, or sell her on. You may have to persuade him to see things from your point of view.’ He stood up. ‘If you find her, call me straight away. We need to talk to her. Thank you for the coffee.’

‘Hey, thanks for all the help—’ I said, but he had already left.

I sat for a while longer, and then I went and dug out the Sig Sauer I had hidden in my sock drawer. It had a full clip of eight .45-calibre rounds, the sort of thing you could stop an
elephant with. I knew Nick was using me. He was like a man throwing a stone into a pool, to see what stirred. I didn’t care. I was going to go anyway.

I was beyond worrying now about being found with a gun in my possession. And having it altered the odds slightly in my favour, although I was quite sure that by now Kevin would have another gun. Perhaps they were all armed. I would soon find out.

I took a train to Oxford. Near the station I found a budget hire company, rented a car and obtained a map. Then I made my way to Harington House. I had no plan in mind except to get there and rescue Adeena. It did not take long, but by the time I arrived at the house it was four in the afternoon and dusk was approaching. I drove past the black iron gates, which were shut, and pulled the car into a small overgrown track that led off the road about a hundred yards beyond the house. Then I walked back until I came to the wall that ran around the grounds. The gates might be locked, but the wall didn’t seem too challenging.

I climbed over a fence into a ploughed field and walked along the headland beside the wall until I found a tree with a low-hanging branch. I used this as leverage to pull myself on to the top of the wall and sat there for a moment, listening. There were no sound of baying guard dogs, or of alarms going off. I didn’t think that Aseeb was that worried about his security – he probably felt a lot safer in Oxfordshire than he did in Afghanistan. I dropped down into a pile of dead leaves and then made my way into the garden.

The house was as I remembered it, although the last time I had been there I had not really paid its external features much attention. It was a large, pleasant-looking building: a
substantial stone-built country house designed with the comfort of its occupants in mind, rather than any aspiration to great elegance. A single black Range Rover was parked outside. Either they hadn’t recovered the other one, or it was out somewhere. I was fairly sure all the doors of the building would be locked, which meant breaking in through a window, or else ringing the front doorbell.

Only an idiot would ring the bell of a house that might be full of armed terrorists, so I walked along the gravel to the front door, found the bell and pushed it. I heard it sound inside. Nothing else happened for a while, except that my pulse moved from its normal seventy up through the one hundred mark. I rang again. This time the door was answered almost the moment my finger left the bell-push. It was Kevin himself, wearing a dark blue suit and his trademark wraparound dark glasses. He stared at me.

‘Butler’s day off?’ I asked. Kevin breathed out through his nose, drawing my attention to the fact that the area around the bridge of his nose was discoloured.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’ he asked.

‘Is the master of the house at home? Might I have a word?’

‘You’d better come in, old man,’ said Kevin, recovering his self-possession. ‘If you would be so kind as to wait in the hall, I will go and see if Mr Khan is available.’

He walked off briskly. I waited. The house was quiet. No sign of anything amiss: no Kalashnikovs lying on the sideboard; no mullahs in black turbans with long beards wandering about. Presently David himself appeared, carrying a silver tray.

‘How nice to see you again, Mr Gaunt,’ he said. ‘Would you care to follow me into the library? Mr Khan will be a few
moments. He thought you might like a cup of coffee while you waited.’

‘Absolutely.’

I followed him into the library and sat down at the table where only a few days ago I had signed the forms they gave me in order to process my marriage to Adeena. It seemed like a lifetime ago. What I wanted to do was run through the house, banging doors open, and look for her. But I knew it was better to wait. I had a few questions I needed to ask Aseeb. So I sat and sipped my coffee. It was very good.

Presently the door opened, and Aseeb came in, followed by Kevin and Amir. The last two leaned against the door and stared at me. Aseeb came and sat down opposite me and poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he smiled suddenly: a big smile showing off his white teeth.

‘How very nice to see you again, Mr Gaunt,’ he said. ‘You left so suddenly the last time you were here, we never had a chance to say goodbye.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said.

‘So was I. So was Kevin. Poor Kevin. He was quite sore for a day or two. I had to give him paracetamol. Why did you thrash the unhappy boy so severely?’

I ignored the question. I could still feel the spot where Kevin’s car had hit me less than a week before.

‘Mr Khan,’ I said, ‘I’ve come to collect Adeena. I think she’s here, isn’t she?’

‘My dear fellow. Now why on earth would you want to see poor Adeena?’

‘She’s my wife, isn’t she?’

Aseeb looked at me in mock astonishment. Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter. Amir gave a little
giggle, a sound at odds with his large and forbidding exterior. Kevin did not join in the joke.

‘Oh, Mr Gaunt, Mr Gaunt,’ said Aseeb. ‘How you do surprise me. We had a contract. I thought it was very clear. I paid you some money for your services. In return we agreed that you would grace Adeena with your family name and confer on her the immense benefits of a future as a British citizen. It was a simple proposal. You take the money. You attend the register office. You sign the documents. Then you go away. Adeena is no longer part of your life, Mr Gaunt.’

‘But she’s my wife,’ I pointed out again.

‘That is a technicality, Mr Gaunt,’ said Aseeb. ‘If you remember, you were a passer-by – a man collected from the street in order to assist in a commercial transaction. I am a commercial gentleman, Mr Gaunt, and Adeena is here to assist me in some of my business ventures. You must forget all about her.’

‘Then why did she leave you and come to me?’ I asked him.

‘She is young, and young people are often foolish and do not know what they really want.’

I tried again.

‘But I like Adeena,’ I told him. ‘Maybe I want her to stay with me. Have you thought of that? Shouldn’t she be free to choose what to do with her life?’